Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Garth and Mekt are twins, and Ayla is their younger sister

No mention of his serum protecting him from red sun rays in either of those stories, but I'm sure I've read that somewhere.

It would definitely seriously mess up the origin story if he naturally had powers under a red sun.

I just remembered: In Action 379, Mon-El states that his serum protects him from lead and red sun rays. Seems like there was an editor's note to that effect in an earlier story though.

All this boils down to is that writers can be lazy in doing research, or they interpret or ignore past stories.

Post-Silver Age writers were not alone in this. While perusing Adventure-era stories a few months ago, I was struck by the details Hamilton and Siegel made up as they went along. "Important" planets, races, and technology were invented to solve a particular story problem and never mentioned again. (The Concentrator, "the most powerful weapon in the universe," from Adv. 321 is one example.)

Details such as Mon's immunity to the red sun also seemed to change to meet story needs.

I don't have Adv. 319 handy, but I vividly remember Adv. 333, which I mentioned above. In the story, Superboy has no powers because he and the Legionnaires are visiting earth during the distant past, in which our sun was red. The story calls for him to stop a bomb from destroying a city, so he does -- or rather Mon-El does, wearing Superboy's costume.

It's a powerful moment: A Kryptonian hero saves Krypton's enemies from a bomb launched by Kryptonians -- and only Mon-El could have pulled it off. He has the same powers as Superboy and resembles Superboy from a distance.

And, of course, this couldn't happen if Mon, too, had lost his powers under a red sun.

So, Hamilton may have ignored that detail (or maybe later writers ignored the idea that Mon retains his powers under a red sun), but the story would have been weakened had the writer taken the time to explain this apparent inconsistency or come up with some other contrived explanation. (Let's face it: Mon's timely arrival is contrived enough.)

As fans, we want every detail to be consistent in our fictional heroes' lives, but writers have to serve the needs of the story they are telling. And, really, who can keep all those details straight for 20-plus Legionnaires over decades of stories?

I agree, HWW, but the Garth/Mekt as twins thing was a pretty huge blunder.

Looks like the idea that the serum gives him powers under a red sun originates with the Origins and Powers of the Legionnaires feature.

I finally got around to reading the story from Superboy #207. I thought it was pretty lousy, and it wouldn't have been any worse if not for the continuity error. The impact of the story, to the extent that it had any impact, would have been in no way lessened if Cary had depicted Mekt as Garth's older brother instead of his twin brother.

I agree that it was a poor choice to make Mekt and Garth twins.

The worst part for me was that the short backup story in # 207 is nothing but a preview for # 208, featuring the LSV. The former story leads us to believe there's going to be some huge confrontation between Garth and Mekt, but instead Garth flies in, blasts Mekt with one lightning bolt, and that's it. Garth isn't even a major player in the story. All of the emotional drama set up in # 207 leads to nothing.

I agree that #207 is more egregious in that, if you knew enough to know they were siblings, you should have made sure you had the twin pairing right, and also that was the 1970's, by then comics had gone past just stories for kids, and the writer's should have known better about being careful.

On the other hand, as Sir Tim Drake points out, that particular detail wasn't germane to the story...

unlike Adv #333, even more so than #319, having the entire outcome depend on Mon-el's lack of vulnerability to red sun rays.

I note the link the "Origins and Power of the Legion" dates that to Adv #316... I wonder if they didn't slip that in because #319 was already written?

Or perhaps that really was by design, and the 'goof' was really that this plot point was subsequently dropped by being ignored (unless someone can recall a mention of it after Action #379? An obvious explanation would be that as he built immunity to the serum, that particular effect wore off ... but I don't recall seeing that anywhere...)

Here's another one, though really an omission, not a goof:

Does anybody remember Superboy#206? that was the one where a clone of Ferro Lad re-appears, then blows up after I think 24 (or 48) hours.

Now move to V4, the TMK book, and the SW6 batch of clones.

given that SB#206 was so close in time to Action #379 (that's the Eltro Gand story, no? which the Bierbaum's drew on heavily), I still can't understand why, not even ONCE, did any character raise even the slightest concern that gee, the last time they had clones of Legionnaires, they blew up after 24 hours?

I was actually expecting that to be a big plot point (dark as the tone was then, I was half expecting them to all blow up at once, actually), but nothing, SB#206 was just ignored.

The SW6 Legionnaires were not clones. They were the original Legionnaires snatched out of time by the Timetrapper.

A more egregious error in Superboy 206 is that Superboy acts all shocked and mystified when the "dead" legionnaires show up and his narration indicates that he has no idea where they came from. Then at the end, it turns out he knew they were clones all along and was testing them for the Legion. It seems pretty heartless for the Legion to have been creating clones, letting them think they were the originals, knowing they were going to blow up and die all over again. Then they just act like, "Oh well, back to the drawing board."

Action 384 was the Eltro story. Action 379 was the Sunburst story.

Yeah, it was heartless manipulation of us fans, too.

Okay, errors by me all over the place...

But didn't the SW6 Legionnaires (or the primary ones), unless I'm way off, originally THINK/ASSUME that the SW6 batch were clones, while it was only later revealed that they were instead pulled out by TT?

IF not (and I'm not ruling this out), then I think I feel a neuro-degenerative disorder coming on.

IF so, I'm not saying it was an ommission they didn't blow up, only that no one appeared to even be concerned about it.

AS for the other comments on #206, I agree ... given all the focus on bio-ethics in the last decades, yeah, that one is in retrospect pretty reprehensible. However, at the time, that type of thing had gone largely un-debated in public forum.

Definitely a good example of comics being a useful historical benchmark for sociological evolution (so of course would old newspapers, but who keeps those?!? )

Yes, I think that the original assumption was that the SW6 batch were clones.

That was at least one possibility that was discussed.

Presumably, however, if they were clones they would've been Dominion-created clones, while it is specifically the Legion's attempts to clone that result in explosion. We know that other groups, most notably the Dark Circle, have successful cloning tech. I'm not sure if the Dominion is ever shown using clones before this, but certainly it would fit in with their overall interest in biotech.

Though given the number of lab-grown humanoids (not necessarily clones) that we see in the Silver Age, it may be better to look at #206 as another Bates-era anomaly that doesn't fit in very well with the overall continuity and simply ignore it.

As another evidence of Cary's poor memory and/or carelessness, in Flash #292 he states the Mirror Master's name as Joe Scudder instead of Sam Scudder. (Which is odd since an alliterative name should be *easy* to remember -- that's why Stan Lee used so many of them.) Cary had a habit of getting villains' real names wrong, according to this thread:

http://speedforce.org/2010/04/review-flash-secret-files/#comment-10112

I have a much earlier issue of The Flash (don't remember the issue number off hand --in the 220s, I think), in which Mirror Master's name is also given as Joe and The Top's name is given as Roscoe Neyle (instead of Roscoe Dillon). Some clever editor eventually decided their full names were Samuel Joseph (or Joseph Samuel, I think) Scudder and Roscoe Neyle Dillon.

That reminds me of this scene from Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters:

Stan Lee has often said that even with the alliterative names, he had trouble from time to time remembering the full names of characters he himself had created.

^Yeah. The reason why Robert Bruce Banner has three names is allegedly because Lee accidentally referred to him as "Bob Banner" in an issue of FF.

I just read that story, and good Lord, that was the most horrible thing ever. Brainy was creating these clones that thought they were the originals, but only had a two-day life-span before thy exploded. And apparently neither he, nor anyone else in the story, nor Cary Bates, saw anything wrong with this.

Clones last longer than that in the 21st century DCU. After a millennium, you'd think the Legion would be at least as advanced as Cadmus.